Posts Tagged ‘paranoia’

Here I had you thinking that Jared was the one going mental, but it turns out it was Jimmy! Well, in Tom’s dream at least. But maybe Jared got to him? Put some thoughts in his head? It’s certainly a possibility. Maybe that question will be answered in the mini trade paperback I’m putting together that collects this arc. Yea… I’m thinking there might be a bonus comic inserted between this comic and Wednesday’s comic that might address that very issue…

Oh, by the way, if you want to see a sketch of Tom with a knife stuck in his back, you can view it by voting for Theater Hopper at buzzComix. Click here to see it.

The sketch isn’t all that good because I didn’t have a lot of time to work on the comic yesterday. About an hour and a half when I came home from work and then another hour or so before I went to bed. For the curious, I was out helping someone celebrate a birthday. I think the comic suffered a little bit, which I’m dissapointed with. Some of the perspective is off.

At any rate, I hope you’re enjoying the story arc. Can you believe it’s gone on now for almost a month? Crazy. Hopefully Tom’s little nightmare will be a nice little cliffhanger whetting your appetites for more. WHETTING, I SAY!

So what’s in theaters this weekend? After what seems like forever, Shaun of the Dead drops stateside. I guess it was mega-popular in the UK. People were constantly sending me e-mails about it from over there a few months ago. “Why aren’t you talking about Shaun of the Dead? You need to do a comic about Shaun of the Dead!” Well, we’re just now getting it, so hold your horses.

From where I sit, the movie looks pretty unique. A love story that spoofs zombie movies at the same time? Interesting. My only concern is will I be able to tell the zombies apart from the non-infected British cast? They’re a pale sort, that’s for sure. I might need to bring a scorecard.

Ahhhh, I’m just pulling your leg, you limeys! All in good fun! Seriously, I’m just playin’…

The only other movie I’m half-curious to see is John WatersA Dirty Shame. It’s a sex comedy with Tracy Ullman and Johnny Knoxville.

Wow. I never thought I would ever write a sentence like that in my life.

This is the brilliance of John Waters, though. Right now he’s forcing movie reviewers around the globe to write the same head-scratching synopsis.

The movie is rated NC-17, which isn’t surprising if you’re familiar with Waters’ past work pushing the boundaries of good taste. Of course this rating instantly motivates me to see it more. What’s all the hub-bub about? All I know is that the normally rail-thin Selma Blair is sporting a pair of giant, fake boobs through the whole picture. I think she plays a stripper, or something named Caprice Stickles. Classic.

The next trick will be finding a theater in good ol’ conservative Iowa that’ll play an NC-17 movie.

Funny story about a John Waters experience I had. I worked at a movie theater tearing tickets back when Serial Mom with Kathleen Turner. We had just closed up all the theaters for that afternoon’s matinee’s when this woman and her 8 year-old daughter come storming out of Serial Mom. She immediately demands to speak with a manager to complain about the movie. “How could you show this kind of filth in your theaters?” and what not. “My child should not have to watch this kind of garbage!”

Our manager gave it to her straight: First, it’s a John Waters movie. If you’re familiar with the history of cinema at all, you’d know he was notorious for filming a 6 foot 2 transvestite eating dog poo on camera. Second, the movie was rated “R”, so it’s your own fault for bring your daughter. Third, the movie is titled SERIAL MOM! Did you hear the title instead of read it and think it was about Frosted Flakes?

Never underestimate the ignorance of the American public.

I’ve been working on a new t-shirt design. It’s my goal to work on the site over the weekend, redesigning the store so I can take pre-orders next Monday. There’s been some buzz about this little fashion item building in the THorum. If you want a shirt, take back some aluminum cans this weekend and be ready to reserve one on Monday!

Curse an overtly polite Midwestern upbringing! Tom has it in his head that Jimmy is trying to take his place, but he’s took locked into his hospitality that he can’t do anything about it.

Incidentally, what Tom WISHES he could do is represented in today’s buzzComix incentive sketch – a parallel reality where ANYTHING can happen! Click here to view it!

We’re coming close to the end of the arc and I’m still toying with a couple of potential endings. I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you have been along for the ride or especially those of you who have been so encouraging! But whichever way it lands, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

The big thing I want to talk about today is the new t-shirt design I was talking about all last week. It’s called “Spoiler” and it is on sale RIGHT NOW in the newly redesigned store!

But I should forewarn you. This t-shirt launch is going to be a little different. Thanks to the good people at Brunetto Shirts, not only are we offering t-shirts, but baby doll tees and hoodies, too!

Not only that, but we’re offering a myriad of color from you to choose from! 22 colors for the t-shirts, 10 colors for the baby doll teesand 7 colors for the hoodies. Now there should be NO reason why everyone can’t get the COLOR of shirt in the STYLE they want!

There’s also a handy Flash application on each page that gives you a rough idea of what the design will look like against different colored backgrounds! I’m telling you, we thought of EVERYTHING!

PRE-ORDERS WILL BE GOING ON THROUGH OCTOBER 15th. So that means you have 3 weeks to gather up your loose change and reserve your shirt before I place the order with the printer. If feedback in the THorum is any indication, this is going to be a really popular shirt, so be sure to get in on the ground floor.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that you don’t like this new shirt. Hey, that’s alright! You haven’t hurt my feelings. In fact, I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to that kind of thing.

That’s why I’m already hard at work on THREE NEW T-SHIRT DESIGNS that will debut shortly after the pre-order time period for the Spoiler shirt ends. I plan on rolling the rest of them out subsequently.

So it’s kind of like the weather here in Iowa; Don’t like it? Wait 20 minutes! Or in this case, about 20 days.

I know some of you will have questions about the links to the posters and DVD pages not working. That was intentional. I gave myself a deadline to put the Spoiler shirts on sale today, so other elements of the store have been put on hold. Access to those areas will be open soon and when they are, you can expect to read about it here.

Some of you might also be wondering about our previous t-shirt – The Pimp Tom t-shirt. Well, don’t worry. It’ll be coming back soon and better than ever. In fact, I’m thinking about producing it with as many color options as I have for the Spoiler t-shirt. I LOVE giving people options!

If you guys have any questions that weren’t covered in this space, feel free to send me an e-mail and I will do my best to answer them!

Before I launch into things, I wanted to ask for your vote at buzzComix really quickly. The top list has reset for October over there and I think it would be really great if we could position Theater Hopper in the Top 3. Heck, if we could get the number 1 spot, that would be a real treat.

To reward those of you that vote, there is an extra sketch related to the comic that you get to view. I think you’ll really enjoy today’s sketch. It depicts Tom’s first unfortunate selection in a clobberin’ rock. Anyway, about today’s comic.

I know it seems like the narrative has been jumping around a little bit these last few strips. Tom hopped into the car with Jimmy on Wednesday and it seemed his paranoia went out the window. Now today’s he’s driving, but the car is out of gas! What’s going on?

I’m just discovering that as I’m wrapping this up, there are some loose ends that need to be tied up and I have to cram a lot of detail and dialogue into fewer panels. In any case, I hope things aren’t TOO jarring and you’re still able to enjoy the story.

You may have noticed that I included some special guest stars in today’s strip. It’s Zach Miller’s Joe and Monkey! If you’re not reading JaM right now, then you’re really missing out on some quality work. Zach has fallen totally in love with his creations and it shows. Did I mention he updates 7 days a week now? It sure beats the updates we’d get every month or so back when Zach was drawing No Pants Tuesday!

I included Joe and Monkey for a couple of reasons. First, I felt that the arc had gone on long enough to warrant a little extra wattage from guest stars. Kind of like when Janet Jackson shows up on Will and Grace, or something. It’s a treat for the people who have stuck with the storyline this far.

The other reason was that Zach has been an exceptional confidant as I feel my way around this story. Zach has a little bit more experience telling a longer narrative than I do, so he’s been great whenever I needed to bounce and idea off of him. I wanted to thank him for it.

I don’t want to give away too much because I got in trouble for it in the THorum, but I think you’ll find the story will really tighten up when it concludes next week. As much fun as I’m having, I’m also kind of ready to put it to bed. I miss talking about movies!

Speaking of movies, there still hasn’t been much in theaters that has captured my attention. I guess Ladder 49 looks kind of interesting, but I probably won’t see it. Pardon the pun, but it looks like a reheated version of Backdraft to me. Do we really need a quasi-remake of a film that came out 13 years ago?

I’ll give props to the producers trying to sneak Joaquin Phoenix past us as a leading man in an action film. Good try, fellas! I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to live vicariously as a hero through the visage of a man with a harelip.

Shark Tale comes out today. Snore! It looks like Dreamworks tried to take the best of Shrek and the best of Finding Nemo and crammed them together to make an unwatchable pile of crap. I’ve read it’s like watching an underwater version of The Flinstones where instead of lame puns about rocks and boulders, they’re about trout and seaweed.

The only new movie that I have my eye on is I Heart Huckabees. The plot is too complicated to go into here, but you can regard it as an existential comedy. Think Magnolia, but with a sense of humor and less frogs.

I’m mostly attracted to its pedigree. David O. Russell wrote and directed the picture. He also did Spanking The Monkey, Flirting With Disaster and Three Kings. He was part of that late-90’s boon of auteur filmmakers that I really enjoy. Alexander Payne and Sam Mendes would also fall into this category.

Casting Jason Schwartzman as the lead in the picture is a good choice. I’ve been a fan of his since Rushmore. Not so much a fan of Slackers, but he was due for something like this. He’s very approachable, but slightly skewed and I like his delivery.

I’ve also heard good things about Jude Law’s performance. Between Huckabees and his lead role in Alfie later this fall, he sound like the one to beat at this years Oscars. They’re already predicting a split between Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor for these two roles. I’ve read that Russell was even able to get a strong performance out of Mary (you can call him Marky Mark) Wahlberg!

All that said, I’m probably staying home this weekend anyway. I’m prepping all the mailing labels on our new shirt so I can mail them out as soon as the order is delivered to my door.

Have you bought a shirt yet? If you haven’t, start collecting the deposit on aluminum can’s now. We’re only accepting pre-orders until October 15th. Once the order to the printer goes out, you’re going to have to wait a little while before you get another chance to get one for yourself! Click here to check out all the style and color options!

As you may have noticed, Theater Hopper was down earlier in the week. This was somewhat related to our recent move to a new server. The story is on that’s pretty complicated and one I’ve been wading in up to my eyeballs, so I don’t know how keen I am on retelling it. But we haven’t talked in a while, so I’ll give it a shot.

Basically what happened was that the server move was successful, but we carried over some unwanted guests into our new environment. Dreamhost – Theater Hopper’s new host – caught them and shut us down. What kind of unwanted guests, you might ask? Hackers. They somehow compromised our old server and were using it as a proxy of some sort. Probably for warez sites. We’re not sure. What we *do* know is that some jackass thought it would be fun to leach our bandwidth, slow our server down and cause a whole lot of problems for people who only want to entertain.

At the time Dreamhost shut us down, they fingered us as guilty before even discussing it with us. That left me a little cheesed off. We’re as much a victim as anyone else here. If they had communicated what they had found, we could have partnered with them to resolve the situation faster. But that’s not how things unfolded. Instead, we had to sit on our hands for two days waiting for them to get back to us. It was a bit of a let down for me because I had heard such great things about Dreamhost. This certainly put us off on the wrong foot.

But things are up and running again and we have a new comic for you today.

I should stop to give sincere thanks to Brian for helping to facilitate the switch and talking to Dreamhost in a language they understand. Left to my own devices, I’m pretty sure Dreamhost would have gotten me kicked off the internet altogether. Also thanks to Dave for reconnecting the database that manages the comics and the blogs after the server move. I’d be dead in the water without these guys.

I’ve gotten a few e-mails asking me if I’ve noticed the similarities between my talking DVD player and Penny Arcade’s DIV. My response is "Yes. I’ve noticed them." But I would like to point out the important difference that my character wears shoes and gloves while DIV is essentially walking around naked. Okay. So my talking DVD player isn’t wearing pants, either. But gloves and shoes are better than nothing!

I tried to make my talking appliance look different from the his more well-known counterpart. But there are only so many ways to anthropomorphize small, grey rectangles of technology.

At any rate, keep your eye on this arc as we’ll probably see a cameo from DIV in the upcoming strips. Maybe a couple other pieces of talking technology as well.

As long as we’re on the subject, you should check out the incentive sketch I drew of the talking DVD player. It was the very first drawing I put together of him, plus some notes for personality traits. The whole idea is that he came to life after being disgusted by Tom’s terrible tastes in movies. So it stood to reason that he should be very tweedy and intellectual. That’s why I’m questioning whether or not he should wear spats. Cuz, y’know… spats make you look REALLY smart!

Something else I wanted to draw your attention to are the FREE COMICS you can download through my page at Clickwheel. If you have a video iPod – or heck, even if you don’t! – check out my most recent updates. I’m adding all of my incentive sketches to the site as miniature anthologies separated by month. This is the first time I’ve made these sketches available outside of the site. If you’re interested, they’re out there!

I’m going to try and keep adding sketches until I’m all caught up. After that, I’ll add more comics.

Thanks to everyone for their patience this week. One thing is for sure, I never really knew how cut off I felt until I was forced into that situation. Not having access to the site for this period of time has made me really thankful for what I have. Thanks to you guys for making that possible!

I didn’t get a chance to see Sex and The City: The Movie this weekend and I’m actually kind of bummed.

I know, I know. I’m turning in my membership card to the He-Man Women Hatin’ Club later this afternoon.

It was just one of those things we couldn’t work out this weekend. Cami was a little under the weather and we were just running in too many directions at once.

TO MY CREDIT… I asked Cami at least three time over the weekend if she still wanted to see the movie. I offered suggestions to what we could do with Henry. Take him to her Mom’s house, put him to bed and have her sister babysit, leave Truman to watch over him…

Fact of the matter was, she just wasn’t feeling well and went to bed about 8:00 PM on both Saturday and Sunday. Drag.

People are talking about the box office SaTC pulled down over the weekend. Almost $56 million, making it the largest opening for a R-rated comedy ever. I would think this would ensure a sequel. Especially considering the television show went off the air over four years ago. It’s really quite impressive.

My sister-in-law tried to see the movie on Friday and told us that the first three showings were sold out. When they finally got tickets, she talked about all of the women that went to the theater “in costume” – dressed to the nines in their fanciest clothes and shoes. Women who had their hair done up like it was a black-tie ball for the movie.

I turned to Cami and said “See! Girls will geek out for the right stuff if prompted!”

My sister-in-law also told us that she saw only one or two guys in a sold out theater and that was the inspiration for this comic.

At any rate, with Cami all riled up with her sister’s positive feedback, I think we’re in position to see Sex and The City sometime tomorrow evening. I’ll be sure to let you know what I think on Wednesday.

As for me? Well, I watched an advanced copy of the new Futurama straight-to-DVD movie – The Beast With A Billion Backs. So if you’re looking for some head’s up on that, tune in for the scoop! I might try to post a full review here on the site tomorrow. So be on the lookout for that.

Sorry for the delay with the blog post this morning. There was something I accidentally uploaded to the comic images folder on the server that made the archive system go ker-flooey! Man, I can’t wait to make the switch to WordPress…

I know, I know. I totally dropped the ball and I feel terrible about it. Basically, I had a conflict at work with a last minute project that soaked up all of my time Thursday and Friday that prevented me from getting a comic online. But the time I had any free time left, it was practically Saturday and I thought I was just better off shelving the comic until today. I should have been in closer communication with you guys and I’m sorry.

If you’ve been following Theater Hopper for any length of time, you know I take this kind of thing pretty seriously. I’m not one of those guys who is going to flake out on your an update “whenever I get around to it.” I treat this gig seriously and I take it as a serious commitment.

With that said, let’s talk about today’s comic.

I might be getting myself in trouble again trying to tackle racial content (even after apologizing for making lame attempts in the past). But I don’t think I’m picking up on anything outlined in the plot synopsis of Lakeview Terrace that the producers of the film didn’t want us to discuss. They pretty much announce it in the trailer when Patrick Wilson’s uptight white neighbor character talks to his lawyer about what he can do to protect his family from the increasingly aggressive neighbor played by Samuel L. Jackson.

“There’s not much you can do,” says the lawyer. “Plus, he has the color issue on his side. And that color… happens to be… BLUE!”

*GASP!* He’s a cop!

The fact of the matter is, this movie would lose half of it’s steam if the cop played by Jackson were of any other ethnicity BUT black. If it was an Asian actor in the role, it would have been just another lame home-invasion thriller.

I’m not saying that the race card being thrown into the mix makes the movie better. I’m just saying… “Buyer Beware.” This film was directed by Neil LaBute who – as a screenwriter – never found a painful social hypocrisy he didn’t feel like shining a great big spotlight on. If you’ve seen In The Company of Men, you know what I’m talking about.

Some people might find LaBute’s predilection for highlighting these issues commendable. I find them exploitative. Not that I expect LaBute to spoon feed us any kind of resolution, but his movies have a habit of parading the most ugly aspects of human beings in front of us and he lets them sit there for us to make a judgment about them. I think the passivity he displaces toward these characters reflects a greater indifference to their attitudes and behavior, which is just as much of an endorsement as anything else. To put it another way, “If you don’t condemn it, you must endorse it.”

Maybe I take LaBute’s work a little too personally because of how uncomfortable it makes me feel. Again, one could argue that his tactics are working. Because what would I have to feel uncomfortable about otherwise?

But I counter that I think his work is not there to evolve any level of discourse. I think his work exists to provoke. I think his work represents a need to hide something ugly within himself, so he uses characters with far more vile traits to hide behind.

Just my two cents. For what it’s worth.

We’ll likely get into these discussions and more at 9:00 PM CST during our weekly recording of The Triple Feature podcast – which you can now access through http://www.thetriplefeature.com

Keep in mind that we are also accepting questions from listeners about anything and everything. You can send us questions about this week’s movies, films we’re looking forward to or even questions about our comics. Send your inquiries to group@thetriplefeature.com and we’ll do our best to answer them on-air.

That does it for me! Thanks again for your patience this week and come back to the site later today for an important announcement regarding the donation drive!